UUMEJ Flashcards
What do the terms TEFL, TESL and TESOL refer to?
TEFL stands for Teachers Of English as a Foreign Language.
TESL stands for Teachers of English as a Second Language.
TESOL stands for Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages. It refers to the professional association, the profession, and the field itself.
What’s the difference between the Theory of FL learning and glottodidactics?
Both are two constituent parts of TEFL.
Understanding the nuances between these two terms is crucial for our professional growth and the advancement of our field.
Theory of FL teaching is a scientific discipline that deals with GENERAL PRINCIPLES AND CONTENTS that can be applied to the teaching of any language
(not only English);
it deals with the problems of teaching as an organised form of teaching
It is interdisciplinary and deals with the results of research from other disciplines: linguistics, psychology, sociology, and pedagogy that are relevant to FL learning and teaching
GLOTTODIDACTICS investigates the effectiveness of teaching approaches, methods and procedures/techniques. Investigates the speed and extent of language acquisition and learning with systematic teaching. The term’ glottodidactics’ was coined by Professor Mirjana Vilke-Prebeg in 1977 in collaboration with Professor Radoslav Katičić
What are the aims of TEFL, theory of FL teaching and of glottodidactics?
- to equip teachers of EFL with the necessary competences to become effective and competent in their teaching
- it is not enough that teachers of EFL know the language –> they should also have theoretical knowledge which enables them to choose approaches and methods in accoradance with the teaching goals and working conditions
Some of the things taught in TEFL?
- the way of presenting the teaching material to the learners - based on theories and ways of performing in class
- theories are related to methods, approaches and techniques
What’s the main goal of teaching EFL?
- to achieve communicative competence (the ability of students to use the FL in real-life situations, such as ordering food in a restaurant or asking for directions)
- this is a formidable task requiring significant effort and dedication
Method - approach - technique - what’s the difference?
Techniques refer to specific, individual activites or tools; specific activities used in teaching (repeating phrases, reading aloud, etc.); the most basic level.
Method is a structured, organised way of teaching that involves a series of techniques or activities; systematic way to organise and present materials to learners based on certain principles.
Approach is the broadest concept and reflects the overal philosophy or principles behind teaching; we use bits of different methods to form a certain approach to teaching
Approaches are related to psychology – and they tell us a lot about the functioning of language, e.g the relationship of language and mind
What are the most important approaches?
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the oral approach: we should give priority to the spoken language as opposed to the written language, it implies not only linguistic elements but also extra-linguistic elements; we should have speaking activities in almost every lesson and early
in the lesson (they could also be warm-up activities) - a multimedia approach (use all the media at our disposal, today ICT)
- the integrative approach: we should promote both cognitive and mechanical ways of teaching; pure mechanical learning has been given up because it would lead only to parrot-like behaviour
- the functional approach; it is the youngest of the four approaches, which means that we have to take into consideration not only grammatical but also semantic categories (D. Wilkins was the the first advocator of the functional approach; he claimed that we should replace our old-fashioned grammar approach of language with functional-notional approach
Our teaching should be CCCL: communicative, contrastive (contrasting English with the mother tongue; it does not mean that the differences
will have to be explained explicitly), cognitive, learning as opposed to teaching
All our activities should end in students’ own learning
What are the two main groups of language aquisition theories and explain their views?
- BEHAVIOURISTIC theory: Skinner; language learning is shaped by the environment; children learn by imitating; positive and negative reinfrocement; the quality and consistency of the language a child hears + positive / negative reinforcement shape language development; environment plays a key source for a child’s language learning
- NATIVIST theory: Chomsky; all human languages share innate universal principles (such as sentence structures and verb usage); children have an inborn ability to understand and develop the language they are exposed to; language aquisition is a natural, built-in process, rather than sth learned solely from the environment; Chomsky proposed a theory of language in which he compared a child to a linguist
Explain the functional theories of language learning!
We associate the emergence of functional theories with the beginning of the 20th century and the Prague school and its popularisation with British linguists, who, in the sixties of the 20th century, redirected attention from mastering language structures to communication skills
Functional theories propose that language is best mastered through practical use, not just theoretical study
They emphasised how, by using the language, they learn all its components
For functional theorists, language ability is not just a part of language learning but a crucial aspect largely conditioned by cognitive development
Two models of functional theories are distinguished in the literature - cognitive and constructional grammar
In cognitive grammar, the essence of language is rooted in a set of meanings constructed through cognitive processes during natural language interactions. This means that the meaning arises from the pragmatic context of language use.
In contrast, constructional grammar is primarily concerned with language structure, examining how linguistic elements are organised and combined. The basic unit of analysis in constructional grammar is a linguistic construction that represents a complete and consistent speech utterance associated with the same communication function.
What do you know about Ferdinand de Saussure? State his dichotomies!
He was the father of the European structuralism - a linguistic direction that developed in the twenties and thirties of the 20th century. His most important and most influential book is Course in General Linguistics (Tečaj opće lingvistike). ‘Course in General Linguistics ‘, Saussure’s most influential work, was not penned by him. It was published posthumously in 1916.
Saussure’s view of language can be reduced to several dualities (dichotomies, antinomies), 5 of them are fundamental:
1) language vs speech
2) signified vs signifier
3) syntagmatic vs paradigmatic relations
4) synchrony vs diachrony
5) internal vs external lingustics
Saussure also added the sixt dichotomy: form and substance
What do you know about Prague School?
The foremost representative of that school of European structuralism was Roman Jakobson.
There’s also Saussure. Languages are studied as structures, language is a closed system with relationships among its elements, each element is a product of a community of speakers
According to Saussure the meaning of a sign is derived from its relationship to other signs
The Prague School later emphasised the idea of distinctive features in analysing language
What do you know about Roman Jakobson? Why is he important?
A pioneer of structural linguistics
Jakobson was one of the most celebrated and influential linguists of the twentieth century
With Nikolai Trubetzkoy, he developed revolutionary new techniques for the analysis of linguistic sound systems, in effect founding the modern discipline of phonology
Jakobson went on to extend similar principles and techniques to the study of other aspects of language, such as syntax, morphology and semantics
He made numerous contributions to Slavic linguistics, most notably two studies of Russian case and an analysis of the categories of the Russian verb
The notion of distinctive features is the linking between the Prague School and Chomsky
What do you know about Leonard Bloomfield? Why is he important?
- father of American structuralism
- Sterling Professor at Yale
- influental textbook - “Language” (1933)
- argued that language, similar to behaviour, could be analysed as a PREDICTABLE MECHANISM
- language could be understood through the external conditions affecting its use
- emphasised empirical description over all other methods
- American structuralism: language is not what somebody dictates it to be but rather what its native speakers articulate; you can’t prescribe the frame, you have to listen to the native speakers
-
Bloomfield’s three principles for language learning:
1. Languages are what you hear from native speakers and not what you think they are
2. Languages are systems consisting of stimuli and responses
3. languages shouldn’t be put in the Latin language frame because of the importance of cultural features ((remember that we see the world through language – Sapir-Whorf’s hypothesis)) - Bloomfield: You should start from the beginning and forget your mother tongue when learning an FL
- He was the inventor of ASTP (Army Specialized Training Program) courses for the American Armed Forces during WWII
- They had to listen to native speakers and repeat
utterances; the emphasis was on correct pronunciation
(to prevent their detection as spies)
Bloomfield: language learning is overlearning (listening, imitating, repetition & repetition, memorising)
Audio lingual, audio-visual and audio-visual global
structural methods resulted from it - Bloomfield’s structuralism is called distributionalism: here the linguistic analysis is based on formal structure: how elements appear and combine in sentences; systematic, scientific approach to language - every language is unique; organising language into ranks or levels (phonemes - morphemes - sentences)
- his predecessors – Franz Boas and Edward Sapir
Difference between European and American Structuralism?
The American structuralists made a groundbreaking discovery that language is not what
somebody dictates it to be but rather what its native speakers articulate. This revelation about
spoken language’s importance, pronunciation, and the significance of phonemes as distinctive
features is truly enlightening.American structuralists: you can’t prescribe the frame, you have
to listen to the native speakers
Spoken language is not a replica of the written language
You should also note that American Indian languages had no written documents – those tribes
were not able to write
European structuralism focused on the written form of language; Saussure
BOTH FOCUSED ON FORM AND NEGLECTED MEANING!
What do you know about Noam Chomsky? Why is he important?
(born in 1928) is an American linguist, philosopher,
cognitive scientist, historical essayist, social critic, and
political activist.
Sometimes called the father of modern linguistics –Transformative-Generative Grammar (TG Grammar)
The basis of Chomsky’s linguistic theory lies in biolinguistics, the linguistic school that holds that the principles underpinning the structure of language
are biologically preset in the human mind and, hence, genetically inherited
Chomsky’s theory unites us all, as he argues that all humans, regardless of sociocultural differences, share the same underlying linguistic structure
Chomsky rejects the radical behaviourist psychology
of B. F. Skinner, who viewed behaviour (including talking and thinking) as a completely learned product of the interactions between organisms and
their environments
Accordingly, Chomsky argues that language is a unique evolutionary development of the human species. This uniqueness is manifested in the
complexity and structure of human language, which is distinguished from modes of communication used by other animal species.
Chomsky’s nativist, internalist view of language is consistent with the philosophical school of “rationalism” and contrasts with the anti-nativist,
externalist view of language consistent with the philosophical school of empiricism which contends that all knowledge, including language, comes
from external stimuli
